The second comic relates to my second observation where I talked about St. Dominic’s technology teacher, Avril Anders. Mrs. Anders is in charge of all of the technology in the building. In her classroom, there is a cart of chrome books that students in older grades can sign out and use for the day. The teachers of the younger grades have to sign them out for classroom use. Speaking of Martin’s four pedagogical systems: connection, translation, off-loading, and monitoring, Mrs. Anders follows only a few of these from what I have observed. For connection, she displays everything on a SmartBoard for every student to see. From what I’ve seen, students in the younger grades do a lot of drawings in technology class, but they come up to the SmartBoard to draw some examples. I would say this example could also relate to translation and monitoring as Mrs. Anders is displaying the overall worksheet in a digital format on the board, but students have normal worksheets at their seats. She is also monitoring students as they come up to draw examples on the board.
In this class specifically, I feel like students are using effects of technology more. In class, someone mentioned that effects of technology is similar to knowing how to do something without having to consult other materials or resources. My students know how to draw and come up with examples on their own as they have experiences to do so. They are also very creative. However, for older grades, they have been exposed to a lot of technology during their time at St. Dominic, so if Mrs. Anders gave them an assignment that required them to use the chrome books and Google docs, they would already have the knowledge of how to log onto the chrome book, find Google docs, understand how Google docs works without being shown, etc.
Based on what I said earlier, my first graders sometimes don’t really have the opportunity in technology class to do their own thing. I believe with the younger grades, this class is heavily monitored because they are so young and don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of technology yet. This reminded me of Morgan’s idea of “Copy and Paste” because I know that my students like to copy exactly what the teacher does at the board. I see this within my own classroom context. I don’t necessarily think that students are able to think freely on their own with the copy and paste idea. Morgan states that “Successful cognition can also be viewed as the extent to which the individual is able to make use of the affordances of the mediating artifacts available to them” (2008). I feel like students should be allowed to explore and learn on their own what they are given. I understand technology is hard to grasp sometimes, but how are we to actually learn some of the functions of technology if we are always being told what to do and how to do it? In my opinion, I believe that distributed cognition in this context means to learn by doing/experience to help them think about what they are doing, to ask questions, and to be involved in the learning process.
ED 386 Educational Technology - Lauren's Blog 